Monthly Archives: May 2015

Part of learning a new meta-game is learning new cheese strategies, and the 4 Gate Adept build popularized by Geiko is a pretty strong Protoss cheese, so here is our first Legacy of the Void (LotV) Protoss build order.

The basic gist of the strategy is to abuse the mobility and tankiness of Adepts. With the Shield Upgrade from the Twilight Council, Adepts have 90 Health and 140 Shields (and 1 armor). Although they have relatively low DPS because of a slow attack speed, their bonus damage against light units allows them to 2-shot workers, Combat Shield-less Marines, and Zerglings.

Above all that, they also have the Psionic Transfer ability to create a shade to bypass static defenses and attack in 2 locations at once. You can also cancel the shade so that Adepts can effectively threaten the main and natural bases simultaneously, forcing the defender to split up or be left completely defenseless.

The build itself is relatively straightforward, and Geiko provides a good explanation in the TL thread: open 2 Gate to harass. Get your Twilight Council for the Shield Upgrade and 2 more Gateways and place a proxy Pylon to start wailing on your opponent. With the Twilight Council, you also have the flexibility to mix in DTs, just to make their lives even more difficult.

This particular game against ViBE shows how strong this build is against Zerg. Going down the list of potential defenses,

Zerglings die in 2 shots

Queens aren’t numerous enough

Spine Crawlers can be bypassed

Roaches aren’t fast enough and actually have less HP/Shields than an upgraded Adept

Although ViBE defends well against the initial 2 Adept poke and even the first warp-in, the next wave of Mass Adepts (still off of 1 base) is too much to handle, even with burrowed Roaches.

This week I had a very hard time deciding which replay to feature on the front page. I knew I wanted it to be one of the games of PartinG vs TaeJa, but I didn’t know which one. There was the double cheese game that ended in a draw, then there was the game after on the same map in which TaeJa cheesed again, and there was this game. I chose this game because TaeJa finally realizes that he needs to mix it up to beat PartinG. In a standard macro game, TaeJa was stomped by PartinG.

In this game, TaeJa opens with a gas first. When one sees this opening, he can expect to see a 1/1/1 hyper-aggressive and possible allin from the Terran player. TaeJa decides he wants to mix in some mind games on this map though. When PartinG’s probe slips past the marine and gets into the base, he sees that the factory is moments from being finished. TaeJa immediately pulls all of his SCVs from gas and pools up to 400 minerals after the probe is dealt with. He soon after puts down a 3rd Command Center, being extremely greedy.

PartinG’s reaction to the potential aggression was to constantly chrono out stalkers and the warp gate tech, delaying his own economy. This puts TaeJa ahead because of his 2 extra command centers on the way. TaeJa also moves his hellion out onto the map to trick PartinG even more. The build that TaeJa showed made PartinG almost positive that it was a 2 hellion, 6 marine, 1 mine, 1 medivac attack at about 6 minutes. When TaeJa moves his hellion across the map, he makes PartinG think for even longer that the build he scouted was accurate information.

TaeJa takes advantage of this trick and goes EXTREMELY greedy. He stays on one gas for very long just so he can get his extra barracks out sooner, then takes 3 gases in progression to tech up as fast as possible. TaeJa also takes his third at the 9:30 mark.

Based on the stats and replays we have on Spawning Tool, it shows that PartinG only ever loses games when they go past the 16 minute mark. TaeJa must have been checking up on our valuable statistics 🙂 , because he wanted to get into the mid/late game as fast as possible!

If people say that INnoVation is a robot, I say that TaeJa is a piece of clay. In game 3 on Iron Fortress, in multple cases, his medivac drops were sniped. This ultimately was too costly and was one of the main reasons why he lost that game. In this game, TaeJa, when sending out drops, would drop one marine out to scout ahead and to the third positions the find PartinG’s army. TaeJa also goes double starport this game in order to counter PartinG’s large colossus count that overwhelmed him in game 3.

The multipronged aggression/multitasking from both players throughout the game was truly impressive. PartinG sends out a warp prism with DTs and attacks mutiple bases with it. TaeJa also defends this agression while killing PartinG’s third base!

Towards the end of this game, you can see why PartinG is known as one of the best players in the world: he just refuses to die. Even when TaeJa was a base up and microing his heart out, PartinG kept on taking good trades with his units and holding the Terran forces back.

TaeJa eventually overwhelms the Protoss army and wins despite PartinG’s efforts.
This game was extremely close. It is surprising that TaeJa, even when he is half retired, can still keep up and take games off of one of, if not the best, Protoss in the world.

This announcement comes a few days late for those who either frequent reddit or watch Fight Night, but there aren’t enough ways to say how excited we are to be sponsoring Team Gravity and their Sunday night series, “Team Gravity’s Fight Night”.

If you have been keeping up with the data on Spawning Tool, this announcement should be no surprise: Team Gravity has been phenomenal in regularly sharing the replays from Fight Night every week. They believe, like Spawning Tool, in having replay data openly available for the community and students of the game. Both through the players and events they support, Team Gravity embodies the spirit and values that we believe are necessary to maintain a vibrant StarCraft 2 scene in North America, and we are proud to be sponsoring them.

What is Spawning Tool? Spawning Tool is a website where you can easily browse pro replays by matchup, build orders, maps, or players. It makes it easy to find, learn, and evaluate new build orders and pull together interesting stats about players and upcoming matches.

What is Team Gravity’s Fight Night? Fight Night is a weekly $100 show match series consisting of two preliminary BO5, and a main event as a BO7. You can see the full list of past participants on liquipedia, but Fight Night #19 featuring TaeJa v PartinG gives you a sense of the caliber of players participating. The events are also sponsored and streamed exclusively on hitbox.tv

You can follow us at @spawningtool or Team Gravity at @TeamGrav for the latest news on what we’re up to. We all hope you are watching Fight Night on upcoming Sunday evenings!

Game 2. Overgrowth. Grand Finals. What do you expect Maru to do? Proxy of course. Maru goes for a proxy marauder. He places it right below Dream’s base, because he expects dream’s reaper to go scout to the his third, then go to Maru’s base (which would then make his barracks unscouted). These type of attempted mindgames only take place in matches where the players know each other very well.

After dream scouts the proxy marauder, he makes the choice to send his reaper to Maru’s base instead of using it to defend. This choice would let him get scv kills, while still defending his own base by pulling scvs.

Maru ends up getting a surround on the reaper which potentially saves this game for him. He had no units on his own side of the map, so this reaper could have been game ending.

After the multitasking dies down, maru goes 3cc! In units, he has a hellion, reaper, and a marauder to defend against any aggression that Dream would throw at him. This is the definition of greed, which is not usually Maru’s play style. He is usually the one multitasking the opponent and constantly applying pressure.

One of the more impressive things in this game is how Maru defended against Dream’s medivac drop at ~ 7:00. His micro is top notch. The fact that he defended this aggression so well means that he can get away with his 3cc. Dream’s followup banshee also gets deflected by a hidden widow mine!

The game evens up after Dream gets 8 scvs in a sneaky double medivac drop as Maru moves his army out onto the map. In order to kill just a little more scvs, he does not attack with his marines until he is on top of the mineral line.

Maru actually forgets combat shields and does not have it researched until ~17:00. Dream did not capitalize on this though.

At around the 18 minute mark, dream sneaks about 30 marines into Maru’s natural and ends up killing a command center. This forces Maru into a counter attack which kills dreams 3rd command center.

These guys are trading blow for blow in the mid-game. They both managed to get maxed by the 16 minute mark, but end up at 100 supply each at the 19 minute mark.

Maru who still has an army advantage and the air advantage closes in and forces Dream into a contain. With great siege tank placement he manages to stop the mining at the natural and forces dream to try something crazy.

Dream ends up trying for a surround by dropping marines behind Maru’s army then attacking with both halves. It almost works, because he has a slight upgrade advantage, but Maru’s medivac count is what saves him. Who would have thought this all started with a scouted proxy marauder? Well, I guess Maru would have ;P

So far, the metagame in the Legacy of the Void beta has been hard to decipher while players are still figuring out the game. Openings are definitely inspired by existing builds, but exact timings and supply counts don’t match. Compositions from then on out are a mish-mash of all units with multiple pivots in-between. It has been really inspiring to see how players are using new units.

As I was going through LotV replays on Spawning Tool, however, I noticed that Nathanias has done new things with old units in reviving a version of the old iEchoic build from Wings of Liberty TvT. The exact build is not too important, but looking at the build order, the important thing is that he starts with Hellions and Banshees, then transitions into Hellions and Battlecruisers. That’s basically the idea.

The build worked in TvT with the basic assumption that there are 3 units that Terran have to counter air: Marines, Thors, and Vikings. At the time, Thors didn’t have the High Impact Payload, so with enough armor on Battlecruisers, neither Thors nor Marines could really handle them, except in very large numbers. Large numbers of Marines get roasted by blue flame Hellions, and Vikings can be countered by more Vikings, and hence, air superiority wins. And all of this can be achieved on a few Factories and Starports by moving add-ons back and forth.

In modern TvZ, Zerg has Queens, Hydralisks, Mutalisks, Corruptors, and Viper’s Parasitic Bomb. To be totally honest, I have no idea why this build should work. I guess standard ZvT is Muta-Ling-Bane. The only meaningful change as part of LotV that I can think of is the Tactical Jump, which would seem to help a lot.

Sorry for not providing more insight on this build, but I don’t have a VOD link, and I can’t watch the replays. Even so, hopefully there are more of you out there who are just as excited as I was to see this build come back. Let me know how this works for you in the beta!